Autumn arrives
In all of her beauty
But below the festivities
There is a swirling mass of
twisted metaphors.

How long does it take a leaf
To lose it's life and fall to the ground?
How many days after the first glimpse of summer fading
Does the leaf begin to lose it's will to live.
For it to transform itself from green to red.
For it to give up clinging to the branch that supports its life.
For it to dry and crumble?
How many of those leaves go unnoticed?
Trampled by a passerbyer
Who gives no second thought
To the crunching the corpse creates.
Oblivious to the numerous
Skeletons beneath their feet.

I can never be sure
Which side will overtake me
Will I engage myself in the customs
The scent of candles and pie filling the house
The warmth of a cup of tea after a chilly walk
The laughter of a family reunited to feast on dinner around a large table
Or will I transcend into the
Swirling mass
Becoming lost in the metaphors
That represent my
Leaf
Of a life.

The stagnant watch of passerbyers
Penetrated with a needing of closure and a surrounding of homeliness
Words laced together in an order not distinguished
Without a sense of security and faith
It shatters and the phrase is broken
Just like everything else in the world and everything else that is just
But nothing is just
Nothing is certain
Burning. Molding. Changing
Life is not certain but it is meaningful
Only to those who can find meaning
In the pieces left behind by those before them
Who have created havoc
Who have created *******
Who have created falseness
Who are damaged
Who are wanting
Faith has created life
Faith has destroyed life
But get on your knees
Pray. Worship. Lie.
Nothing to save you
Nothing to save you
A bunch of fuckery
Myths all tied together
None is real
Suffering is imminent
Life is imminent
The passerbyer walks
With disappointment

She had me in her palm, that sway of her laughing heart.
The sunflower of earth, giver of my life,
A peach scented woman, thick skin she’d cut open,
Hoping that the next passerbyer would heal her
Fill her with hope then,
She might know how to love me instead of shove me
Like a curtain,
But we didn’t have any of those,
Instead sheets hung loose over windows
And the world didn’t have to see in the home to know
That sheets are not curtains.
That a woman with six children hides in her room and
I’d never realized how broken she was
While I was too caught up in the whispers from the other mothers
They’d say “how unfortunate”
Then move on to the topic of sunday brunchin
I grew to hate them, and myself,
Was I trash? Can I be helped?
It’s all up in the air.
The air that never flowed through our sheet covered windows
And oh, my soul, I was there to see
The kind of woman they all thought I’d be,
I was there to see the real woman
Laying in bed at 5PM, hasn’t moved an inch
But her eyes stayed wide open.
There were times I thought she died
And I would cry
Because the relief sometimes outweighed the grief
And that’s no way for a heart to be broken.
I was a child then, my mother was too.
She is a child still and I’m now 22
I still fear who I could be, who I might be
If that grief should cease, let the light return to me.